Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Farewell to a friend

Earlier this week, I went to a friend's funeral.

I never like attending funerals, of course, but I do want to honor the lives of people I've known.

The best funerals, I think, are the ones that paint a person in a true light. At my grandmother's funeral, for example, the pastor told two stories. First, he told how as a young woman during the Great Depression she went to Sweet Briar to study romance languages. Second, he told how she truly cared about people from all walks of life.

Sure, the fact that she was privileged was only half the story, but it was an important part of the story.

Sometimes funerals paint only part of the picture. I once heard a young pastor describe an 85-year-old woman who'd lived a colorful, courageous life as if she'd been a mindlessly submissive homemaker.

Another time, a pastor was eulogizing someone who was passionate about his career, performed his job at an unusually high level and used his platform to make a difference in his community.

But in nearly an hour of stories, the pastor never mentioned what this man had done for a living. In fact, he expressed regret that the deceased never entered full-time religious ministry.

Yet this man had found his true calling. He'd touched the lives of nearly everybody in his community. That was his ministry!

The funeral I attended this week contained not a single story about the deceased. According to the pastor, that was according to our friend's wishes.

I'm not going to tell you the friend's name, because he wouldn't have wanted to see his name in the paper.

Believe me, that wish alone rarely keeps me from putting somebody's name in print. But my friend was an unusually private and humble person.

Lots of people act humble because in the long run you can accomplish more when people aren't trying to knock you down a peg. In fact, acting humble is a solid strategy for becoming important.

For my friend, though, humility was not a means to an end. He didn't want people to think he was humble, and he didn't want people to think he was important.

When he talked to you, he didn't sound like somebody who'd just read "How to Win Friends and Influence People." He truly wanted to know more about people and to learn from them.

When you asked him about his life and his job, he made it sound boring and unimportant.

He was already studying the book of Job when he discovered he was terminally ill. Before we knew it, he was gone.

I wondered if I'd be among just a handful of people at his funeral. Instead, a large crowd filled the pews. He'd influenced many people by not trying to influence anybody.

We all were there because of the person he truly was, not somebody he was trying to appear to be.

And that made him unusually important and special.

His reward, as the Good Book says, is in Heaven.

Farewell, my friend.

This story was originally published September 18, 2015 at 10:00 PM with the headline "Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Farewell to a friend ."